Altered States

By Jeff Shannon

It's easy to understand why the late, great screenwriter Paddy
Chayefsky removed his name from the credits of Altered States and
substituted the pseudonym Sidney Aaron. After all, Chayefsky was a revered
dramatist whose original source novel was intended as a serious
exploration of altered consciousness, inspired by the immersion-tank
experiments of Dr. John Lilly in the 1970s. In the hands of maverick
director Ken Russell, however, Altered States became a full-on
sensory assault, using symbolic imagery and mind- blowing special effects
to depict one man's physical and hallucinatory journey through the entire
history of human evolution. It's a brazenly silly film redeemed by its
intellectual ambition--a dazzling extravaganza that's in love with science
and scientists, and eagerly willing to dive off the precipice of
rationality to explore uncharted regions of mind, body, and spirit.
William Hurt made his bold film debut as the psycho-physiologist who plays
guinea pig to his own experiments; Blair Brown plays his equally brilliant
wife, whose devotion is just strong enough to bring him back from the most
altered state imaginable. From the eternal channels of sense memory to the
restorative power of a loving embrace, this movie rocks you to the birth
of the universe and back again. And while it's clearly not the story that
Chayefsky wanted on the screen, the directorial audacity of Ken Russell
makes it one heck of a memorable trip. This film marks the screen debut of
Drew Barrymore.